April 06, 2010

SIUC to host ‘Crime and Terrorism Conference’

by Andrea Hahn

CARBONDALE, Ill. -- Terrorism threats and acts of violence make daily headlines, but even with all the news coverage of individual events, the subject of terrorism in general can be difficult to decode.

The Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Southern Illinois University Carbondale hosts the “Crime and Terrorism Conference” on April 15 at the John C. Guyon Auditorium in Morris Library.


Media Advisory

The conference is open to members of the media, including reporters, photographers and camera crews. To access any of the conference guests for individual interviews, contact Kimberly Kempf-Leonard, chair of the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, at 618/453-6379 or kleonard@siu.edu.


Here is a schedule of papers and discussions:

1-2:30 p.m.

• Critical Incident Preparedness and Responses on Campus -- Joseph Schafer, Matthew Giblin and George Burruss, SIUC Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice

• Cultures of Violence and Acts of Terror -- Christopher Mullins and Joseph Young, SIUC Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice

• Plea Bargaining with Terrorists -- Lucian Dervan, SIU School of Law

• Longitudinal Patterns of Terrorist Activity, 1970-1997 -- Nancy Morris, SIUC Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice

Discussant -- David Kauzlarich, Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice Studies, SIU-Edwardsville

3-4:30 p.m.

• The Intersection of Crime and Terrorism -- Laura Dugan, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland

7-8 p.m.

• The Global Terrorism Database -- Gary LaFree, Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, University of Maryland

LaFree is the director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) and the president and a Fellow of the American Society of Criminology as well as a member of the National Academy of Sciences Committee on Crime, Law and Justice. He is a past president of the ASC’s Division on International Criminology. He is a past recipient of the G. Paul Sylvestre Award for outstanding achievements in advancing criminal justice statistics and the Phillip Hoke Award for excellence in applied research. In addition, he has many other professional affiliations and extensive publications, including three books. In addition to his expertise on global terrorism, LaFree’s research interests include determinants of sentencing and official statistics in the area of criminal justice.

Dugan is a member of the National Consortium on Violence Research and the Maryland Population Research Center as well as the National Center for the Study of Terrorism and the Response to Terrorism. Her research interests include the effects of interventions aimed at reducing criminal and terrorist violence, and designing methodological strategies to address data limitations in the social sciences.

Kauzlarich is chair of the Department of Sociology and Criminal Justice at SIUE. His research interests include state crime, peace studies, victimology and human rights. He teaches courses in criminology, social theory, and white-collar crime. He is the 2009 recipient of the Paul Simon Outstanding Teacher-Scholar Award at SIUE, where he was also the William and Margaret Going Endowed Professor Award recipient for 2008. The American Society of Criminology-Critical Criminology Division named him the Critical Criminologist of the Year.

For more information about the Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice at SIUC, including biographies of all SIUC faculty members at the conference, see the Web site at www.ccj.siuc.edu/.